Yesterday the scattergun approach to claiming rights on content people simply don’t own hit an inappropriate target, to say the least.

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, the 6,000 employee giant behind many open source enterprise products including Red Hat Linux. Apparently, even a man with Tiemann’s credentials and copyright awareness can’t escape bogus YouTube claims.

After creating a video recently, Tiemann decided to set it to music. Quite appropriately he headed off to ccMixter, a site which originated as a Creative Commons site a decade ago and one which provides samples, remixes and a cappella tracks under Creative Commons licenses.

Tiemann selected Sunray, a track available under a CC-BY-NC 3.0 Creative Commons license, married it to his video and uploaded it to YouTube. Things didn’t go well.

Straight after the upload a user called “RouteNote” claimed copyright ownership over Tiemann’s video. He filed an immediate dispute and RouteNote promptly dropped the claim. But then things started to get silly.

Routenote are probabaly owned by some music company who know how lax Youtube are at checking they are giving the money to the actual creator, I suspect there are many small paper companies of this same sort with the same dubious provenance.